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DIW Discussion Papers 1078 / 2010
We study the determinants of sovereign bond yield spreads across 10 EMU countries between Q1/1999 and Q1/2010. We apply a semiparametric time-varying coefficient model to identify, to what extent an observed change in the yield spread is due to a shift in macroeconomic fundamentals or due to altering risk pricing. We find that at the beginning of EMU, the government debt level and the general investors' ...
2010| Kerstin Bernoth, Burcu Erdogan
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DIW Discussion Papers 1077 / 2010
In this paper we use fractional integration techniques to examine the degree of integration of four US stock market indices, namely the Standard and Poor, Dow Jones, Nasdaq and NYSE, at a daily frequency from January 2005 till December 2009. We analyse the weekly structure of the series and investigate their characteristics depending on the specific day of the week. The results indicate that the four ...
2010| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana
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DIW Discussion Papers 1070 / 2010
This paper examines the relationship between US disposable personal income (DPI) and house price index (HPI) during the last twenty years applying fractional integration and long-range dependence techniques to monthly data from January 1991 to July 2010. The empirical findings indicate that the stochastic properties of the two series are such that cointegration cannot hold between them, as mean reversion ...
2010| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana
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DIW Discussion Papers 1066 / 2010
Survey-based indicators such as the consumer confidence are widely seen as leading indicators for economic activity, especially for the future path of private consumption. Although they receive high attention in the media, their forecasting power appears to be very limited. Therefore, this paper takes a fresh look on the survey data, which serve as a basis for the consumer confidence indicator (CCI) ...
2010| Christian Dreger, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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DIW Discussion Papers 1064 / 2010
This paper examines the forecasting performance of a broad monetary aggregate (M3) in predicting euro area inflation. Excess liquidity is measured as the difference between the actual money stock and its fundamental value, the latter determined by a money demand function. The out-of sample forecasting performance is compared to widely used alternatives, such as the term structure of interest rates. ...
2010| Christian Dreger, Jürgen Wolters
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DIW Discussion Papers 1036 / 2010
We suggest to use Internet car sale price advertisements for measuring economic inequality between and within German regions. Our estimates of regional income levels and Gini indices based on advertisements are highly, positively correlated with the official figures. This implies that the observed car prices can serve as a reasonably good proxy for income levels. In contrast to the traditional measures, ...
2010| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Boriss Siliverstovs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1029 / 2010
In this paper we model the volatility of the spread between the overnight interest rate and the central bank policy rate (the policy spread) for the euro area and the UK during the two main phases of the financial crisis that began in late 2007. During the crisis, the policy spread exhibited signs of volatility, owing to the breakdown in interbank market activity. The determinants of this volatility ...
2010| John Beirne, Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Nicola Spagnolo
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DIW Discussion Papers 1017 / 2010
This paper examines the long-run relationship between energy consumption and real GDP, including energy prices, for 25 OECD countries from 1981 to 2007. The distinction between common factors and idiosyncratic components using principal component analysis allows to distinguish between developments on an international and a national level as drivers of the long-run relationship. Indeed, cointegration ...
2010| Ansgar Belke, Christian Dreger, Frauke de Haan
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DIW Discussion Papers 1016 / 2010
This paper analyses the long-memory properties of high frequency financial time series. It focuses on temporal aggregation and the influence that this might have on the degree of dependence of the series. Fractional integration or I(d) models are estimated with a variety of specifications for the error term. In brief, we find evidence that a lower degree of integration is associated with lower data ...
2010| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana
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DIW Discussion Papers 1009 / 2010
We model EU countries' bank ratings using financial variables and allowing for intercept and slope heterogeneity. Our aim is to assess whether "old" and "new" EU countries are rated differently and to determine whether "new" ones are assigned lower ratings, ceteris paribus, than "old" ones. We find that country-specific factors (in the form of heterogeneous intercepts) are a crucial determinant of ...
2010| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Roman Matousek, Chris Stewart